Using the bass clef for bass but make it sound one octave lower?(no 8vb clef)

• Apr 24, 2017 - 19:46

I was just told that using the 8vb bass clef for the contrabass wasn't necessary and not standard, so I decided to implement the traditional bass clef; however, there are many sections of the score for the bass that have too many ledger lines beneath the f clef system. Is there anyway I can notate the entire bass line using the traditional bass clef but make it sound one octave lower? Thank you.


Comments

Yes, go to Staff Properties and set the Play Transposition to be down an octave. This is the way the bass will be set up by default starting with 2.1. Although FWIW, it's not uncommon in modern publications to see the bass clef clef with the 8, because Finale long did it that by default as well.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Hey Marc, I followed your steps and I am confused on this matter and would like more clarification. I selected the entire bass line system and inserted my new bass clef. This made all the notes go down one whole octave. I then selected the entire bass clef line fro beginning to end again and went into staff properties and selected Play Transposition to be down one octave and all the notes remained in the same position. I then selected all the notes and brought them back up an octave and all the notes are sounding an octave higher. Further clarification would be great. Thank you.

In reply to by Daniel Ani

Yes, sounds like you have concert pitch turned on. In which case, you should actually put the bass-8vb clef back unless you like seeing all those ledger lines. Then turn off concert pitch, and *then* change the clef to regular bass clef and follow the steps as before. What you want is to use bass-8vb in concert pitch mode, regular bass with concert pitch off. MuseScore keeps track of this for you.

If you need further help, please attach the actual score and describe what you are having trouble with.

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